


The C Word

by fiorinda_chancellor



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: (how often do you get to use a tag like that?), Crack, First Time, Fluff and Smut, Johnlock - Freeform, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Octo!John - Freeform, OctoJohn, Octopi & Squid, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, and kinda PG-13ish, though quite gentle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:25:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hot fortnight in London. A desperately bored Consulting Detective. An Army Doctor with the usual dating problems. And something very, very unusual going on in the bath....</p><p>A present for the gifted <a href="http://archiaart.tumblr.com">Archia</a> (aka <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/deuxexmycroft/pseuds/deuxexmycroft">deuxexmycroft</a>) to go with her delightful Octo!John fanart <a href="http://archiaart.tumblr.com/post/57880670549/maybe-mused-sherlock-i-should-buy-a-bigger-tub">here.</a></p><p>(ETA: just added in <a href="http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/57992197185/the-c-word-notes-and-links">the "C Word" note over at the Lotus Room blog:</a> YouTube video of how octopi do what John does in the tub. [Well, more or less.] Absolutely unbelievable if you haven't seen it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The C Word

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deuxexmycroft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deuxexmycroft/gifts).



_Hot:_ just _too hot._ London had for the past few weeks been sweltering — temperatures way too high even for the season, sun hammering down unrelentingly onto the broad avenues, sweat-soaking humidity lying heavy and miasmic in the narrow streets. The thick brick walls of 221B had protected the two of them to a certain extent, but the west-facing windows, even when the curtains were drawn, radiated heat like the elements of the Dualit toaster Sherlock had (admittedly, accidentally) destroyed last week in a fit of _ennui_ disguised as scientific inquiry. Late in the day, the flat got difficult to stay in with the windows closed: opening them only made it worse. Not even the dark—which naturally took forever to come, this time of year—brought much relief. Everyone who wasn’t kept in London by work and had a way to get to the seaside or somewhere else out of the city’s stifling heat had done it. Everyone else was either holding still, seeking shade, or repeatedly wetting themselves down in whatever body of water was closest.

There were side effects of this meteorological hiccup that could be read as positive, depending on where you stood. Crime was way down, as the criminal classes were suffering from the heat as much as everyone else, and mostly couldn’t be arsed to move. Those who _were_ arsed were generally so stupid or desperate that even Lestrade’s dimmer Yarders were having no trouble catching them. 

All this left Sherlock without one of the minor annoyances of his life—that is to say, being plagued with cases that ranked less than a level five—and at the same time bored out of his wits, and more bored every day, as any criminals capable of crimes _better_ than a five buggered off out of town to more tolerable climes (Scandinavia or the Alps, or in the case of the more financially challenged, Brighton or the West Country). This phenomenon left Sherlock repeatedly sprawled on the settee in 221B’s sitting room in his thinnest and most-worn T-shirts and very lightest pyjama bottoms, perspiring in a way he hated admitting to, unable to cogitate effectively due to the heat, and profoundly unsettled in mood. 

Part of the moodiness was due to John. John was off his game as well: short-tempered with the heat, frustrated (to a lesser extent) by the lack of cases, and driven nigh around the bend on his clinic days by idiots who ran around in the heat playing football and courting sunstroke, or needlessly damaged themselves faffing about in the city’s venerable fountains, or passed out from straightforward dehydration. And it was from just such an infuriating day, when the fierce arrows of sun through the sitting room curtains had faded to a dull molten glow as the Sun sank just out of sight behind the buildings on the far side of Baker Street, that John came stomping up the seventeen steps, looked in to see what Sherlock was doing, sighed on seeing his present situation—essentially unchanged from that of the morning—and said, “Anything on?”

 _“Noooo,”_ Sherlock moaned in overheated desperation, and rolled over to glare at the cushions of the settee.

“Right,” John said, “then I’m for the shower.”

“Bath would work better,” Sherlock said. 

“Nope, no time. Date.”

“Oh _wonderful,”_ Sherlock moaned. 

John vanished in the direction of the bath, leaving Sherlock lying there sweating and morose. And half an hour later the doctor was dressed in his one good blue suit and his best crisp white shirt, _already wilting in this heat, it’s useless, John,_ and a _tie_ for pity’s sake, _you genuinely must be insane, she’s really not worth it,_ and even a petrol-blue silken pocket square picking up the deeper blue of his eyes, _oh,_ _your eyes, John,_ _their gaze wasted on that fatuous vacuous little would-be social climber…_ He looked better than anyone had a right to look under such circumstances. Sherlock knew it wouldn’t last: the steamy heat would reduce John and his suit to limp rags in short order. _And then he’ll get back here in a foul temper and get himself into the bath like a sensible person._

Both of them had been in the bath a lot, and the water bill the month after next was going to make John go on one of his we-need-to-save-money rants for sure; but it couldn’t be helped. Core temperatures had to be kept down somehow, and there was only so much ice water you could drink. Now Sherlock lay there wondering whether he’d indeed be forced to resort to the bath for the third time in eighteen hours. He silently cursed his transport for so disturbing his thoughts—not that they were up to their usual standard today. 

For it was hard to be brilliant in the face of such intolerable heat. Time and time again he’d closed his eyes and slipped into his mind palace to think alpine thoughts (waterfalls plunging great distances down through cool shady pine-haunted mountain crevasses), arctic thoughts (glaciers calving vastly off into ice-blue polar seas), even thoughts of the coldest cold there could be (bare degrees above absolute zero, concepts of hard vacuum and the lowest reaches of the Kelvin scale and the emptiest unstarred depths of deep space—boring places where he never bothered to go in thought except under such wretched circumstances as these). But again and again Sherlock’s unruly body forced him back to the consciousness of sweat beading his forehead and running sideways down his chest and pooling sticky under the small of his back, whilst bright knives of baking summer light slid sidewise through the curtains, and the wholly inadequate little fan on the front bookshelves jerked itself hopelessly back and forth, powerless to do anything but stir the warm air around. 

_…John_ in the bath, though. _That_ was worth thinking about, even if Sherlock couldn’t observe it directly. John was so… Not _prudish_ as such: his joint Army and medical history militated against that. _But so irrationally private, some ways._ It hardly made sense; they shared so much, were in such comfort with one another. The barrier struck him as needlessly artificial. And the thought of gazing his fill on that compact, golden, perfectly-knit body, stretched out at his ease in cool water, splashing a little as he moved, head leaned back, eyes closed, lips parted, sighing in pleasure…

Sherlock had accidentally heard one of those sighs yesterday afternoon, as he made his way from his bedroom back up to flop on the settee again. Well, maybe it hadn’t been _entirely_ accidental. Maybe he’d lingered a little longer than necessary in his room so as to come out just as the water was having the first and best of its effects on the man who’d just slipped down into it. The long soft sound had brought the gooseflesh up all over Sherlock as if a cool breeze had found its way into 221B from some shady forest glade. Unfortunately it hadn’t lasted. It would have been nice to get into that water himself. _Need a bigger bath for that, though. …And an excuse. Checking the water for possible contamination, perhaps? Hmm. Can’t have John contaminated. Wholly unacceptable. And impossible to properly assess the conditions of said contamination without subjecting oneself to it at the same time…_

He was distracted from plotting what kind of contamination he would have to invent ( _these old pipes, there could be anything built up in them after all these years, isn’t it marvelous…)_ by John sticking his head in the sitting room door after pausing for a splash of cologne (crisp but also lemony; not the 4711 in the fridge, then, but the Farina). “I’m off out,” John said. “Make sure you take it easy. Don’t forget to keep hydrated.” 

“Yes, of course, I’m an obvious candidate for sunstroke lying here in a room with the curtains drawn,” Sherlock muttered. 

John just gave Sherlock a look of slight amusement at what he correctly understood as a poorly concealed comment on yet another date. “Go have a bath,” he said. “I’ll be late.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes in languid fed-up-ness and shoved his face against the cushions. Seconds later John’s footsteps were making their way down the stairs and the front door closed.

 _Dates,_ he thought. _Hateful. And this one more hateful than usual._ He hadn’t even needed to clap eyes on this one—he sought for the name briefly, only so that he could impart the necessary venom to it— _Arabella._ He’d already deduced everything about her that he needed to know. _Dreadful ersatz-posh little ombre-dyed Next-wearing Prêt-eating fake-Manolo-flaunting—_

Sherlock groaned again and rolled over to stare at the cold dark fireplace. _Not_ one _of them is or has been good enough for him, ever,_ he thought. _Not a single one._ Maybe that fact should have obscurely cheered him, for it meant that sooner or later John, always sensible if routinely a little slow on the uptake, would come to his senses and let this ridiculous search for the perfect woman go by the boards. _But when? Why do you torture yourself this way, John?_

 _Why do you torture_ me _this way?_

Sherlock groaned and tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. “The bath,” he muttered. _Might as well._

And so he had the damned bath, for all the good it did him, and dried out and got into the tee shirt and pyjama bottoms again, and flung himself down on the couch; and shortly was just as hot as he’d been when he started. _Useless exercise. I refuse to pander to this bloody transport any longer._

So Sherlock lay on the settee and waited in inexpressible and infuriated boredom (broken only by one completely unnecessary text to John, sent only to stir things up a little) until the tawny fire of the afternoon started sliding into the blue of early evening: until the door downstairs clicked open and shut again, until the footsteps coming upwards (quick, exasperated, _annoyed_ , oh glorious) topped out at the landing and John stood there, his hair out of sorts past the ability of any known product to restrain it, his suit rumpled (two _cab rides, windows open the second time, seat belt marks on both sides meaning he didn’t take his usual right-hand seat both ways, she took it outbound but not on the homeward leg…_ ), and his expression tight and somehow both grim and resigned. 

Sherlock noted a few other details, telling though minor, and chose not to mention them immediately. “A bit early,” he said. 

“Yeah, tell me about it,” John said. “No, on second thought, don’t. I need a shower. And then a bath.”

“Who has a shower and _then_ a bath?” Sherlock muttered. 

“I got sweaty,” John shouted down the hall. “I don’t want that in the bath with me. I want to get _clean_ first.” And the bathroom door slammed. 

Sherlock smiled gently at the evidence, utterly clear to read, of John having had a terrible, a truly _disastrous_ date, one so dreadful that he actually wanted to scrub any possible reminders of it off his skin. _Take_ that _, Arabella,_ he thought. _No more of_ you _and the taint of your cheap aspirational designer-knockoff life. What a blessed relief._

 _Now to think of a way for John not to feel like he needs to keep_ on _with these inane, insane pursuits…_

He sank deep into thought over this, spending no more than a few seconds considering how much easier it seemed to be to think, even in this heat, when John was on site. From down the hall the normal sounds came floating back to Sherlock over the next half hour: towels being procured, bathrobes dug out, doors opening and closing; the hiss of the shower, the mutters and murmurs and soft unthinking grunts of a man getting less angry and getting clean and finally becoming able to relax into the flow of the water and the release of built-up tension. Sherlock closed his eyes and sighed at that. It wasn’t right, it was more than a bit not good, for John to be tense. He deserved some calm on his evenings off, some peace, though such concepts might be anathema to Sherlock much of the time. 

In the bathroom things became quiet, and stayed that way for some while. Very softly Sherlock got up from the settee, wondering if there might be a chance to hear one of those cool slow forest-glade-escapee sighs. 

“Oh bloody hell,” John suddenly muttered over the sound of running water. 

Sherlock had a gift for skulking—a useful feature in the skillset of a consulting detective who couldn’t always take the time to do things by the book. He was good at it outside 221B, but within the flat’s walls when exercising this part of his art his mastery was complete. Except for that one particular creaky step on their stairs, which he’d considered repairing and had then decided not to, there was no place in the flat to which Sherlock couldn’t make his way in utter silence. The reasons for this varied in importance and desirability (not awakening John when he was exhausted; amusing himself by freaking John out when he needed a brief jolt of annoyance to jar him out of some unprofitable train of thought…). But now there was the best reason of all: observing something or someone without being observed in return. _He_ did _after all say ‘Oh bloody hell.’ He might have hurt himself somehow. Cut himself shaving. Whatever. It’s an excuse…_

There were no further exclamations of distress, but this was no reason, Sherlock told himself firmly as he slipped shadow-silent down the hall, to assume that all was well. Bathrooms could be dangerous. 

By the door, he paused, he listened. Nothing. Running water. Then it stopped running. 

Quiet, and a little splashing as of someone stirring, settling in the bath.

In complete silence Sherlock turned the door handle, eased the door open and cautiously peered in. 

His eyes widened. 

Over the faint cleanly scent of the Wrights coal tar soap that John favored there was another odd scent overlaid, also clean but more assertively sharp and briny; something Sherlock had smelled before, faintly. He’d noted the seaweed bath gel John had picked up at Boots recently, and had assumed that was it. There was of course no way Sherlock was going to exert himself opening a bottle of something so relentlessly downmarket to check. 

Now, though, Sherlock was forced to admit, against all his normal instincts, that he might have missed something. John lay back in the bath, stretched out at his ease in the cool water, head leaned back on the rim at the away-from-the-taps end, his eyes closed, lips parted, breathing softly in and out in pleasure. It was so perfectly the image from Sherlock’s own fantasies that he was nearly transfixed by it. 

But only nearly. Because this vista had one element that Sherlock’s fantasy had notably lacked. To wit, numerous shining blue-grey tentacles, paler on the underside and delicately suckered, were wreathing gently around the bath from where they lay draped over its rim. One of them, reaching out further than the others, was feeling around on the bathroom’s tiled floor. Just out of its reach, or its reach so far, was a bottle of lube. 

Sherlock stood there viewing this extraordinary sight and did nothing for a long second or three. 

Then, quite silently, he did the only thing that seemed logical under the circumstances. He reached down, picked up the lube bottle, and then gently slapped it into the curve of the questing tentacle as one slaps a dropped surgical instrument into a surgeon’s palm. 

Reflexively the tentacle curled around the bottle of lube: then froze. 

Sherlock straightened up, then stood quite still and said nothing.

John’s eyes flew open. His gaze slid sideways and up, meeting Sherlock’s.

All the tentacles instantly disappeared. 

The effect was interesting, in that the lube bottle now appeared to be floating more or less in midair. But the disappearance wasn’t complete. The tentacles were simply very effectively mimicking the color and shadowing on the sides of the bath over which they’d been hanging. Even as they tried to very quietly draw themselves down into the water and out of sight, Sherlock had to admire the way they matched the porcelain both inside and out, especially the slight difference of its color as affected by the refractive quality of the water in the bath. The movement, though, betrayed their nature and structure slightly but inevitably to the educated eye. 

Sherlock’s eyebrows went up. 

_“Sherlock!”_ John said, trying to sound faintly outraged. The effect was less than successful, as he also sounded more than a little shocked. 

“John,” Sherlock said, restraining a shiver of unwanted irrational response. Even he had to admit to himself at this point that he was presently performing a series of internal verbal-resource reallocations that in lesser mortals would have been described as “fumbling for words”. 

“What are you doing in here?” 

“Watching you,” Sherlock said, and continued his efforts at verbal reallocation, “…trying to hide your tentacles?”

John was holding very very still now in the water—both the more routinely-seen part of him, down to just below the waist, and the newer developments, only shadowily perceptible in the water. “Tentacles?”

“John,” Sherlock said. “You know I haven’t had so much as an ibuprofen since you last stitched me up. Do me the courtesy of not attempting some simplistic subterfuge that wouldn’t work with anyone not presently in the midst of a pentothal induction or a full-blown LSD experience.”

John’s mouth opened, then closed. “All right,” he said after a moment. 

They spent the next ten seconds or so simply looking at each other, each one waiting for the other one to do or say something. Sherlock’s patience, perhaps predictably, gave first. “Come on, John,” he said. “Bring them back.”

John let out a long breath, sounding almost defeated. Gradually the tentacles reappeared, fading back into view; the tangle of them—eight of them, as Sherlock had originally thought—starting from just below John’s waist, just along a curved line reaching from iliac crest to iliac crest and dipping about an inch and a half below the umbilicus.

“Unusual,” Sherlock said after a moment. 

John looked at him with an expression that was rather unnervingly neutral. “’Unusual’? That’s what you’ve got for this situation?”

“Well, all right,” Sherlock said, grudging: _“unique.”_

John just stared at him. “Unique…”

“John. I’m a scientist.” He reached down into the water to touch one of the tentacles. It was water-slick, but not silkily so, and though wet, quite warm. “And when one eliminates the impossible…”

John shivered a little. Then, one by one, slowly, the tentacles crept up out of the water to lay themselves, tentatively, almost in a gingerly manner, over the rim of the bath.

Sherlock stroked the broad round back of the nearest tentacle where it lay curved over the bath's rounded rim, noting the ever-so-slightly pebbled texture—a little like the skin of an orange, though far softer. “Then what remains…” He shrugged. 

John breathed out, and something about the sound of that breath got right down underneath Sherlock’s pyjama bottoms and stroked him back. 

But then John’s eyes fell closed again, and he let his head fall back onto the rim of the bath with a _thunk._ His face actually sagged: he looked stricken, covering his eyes with one hand. “Sherlock. I’m so sorry. I’ll get onto the online estate agents first thing in the morning and start looking for somewhere else to—”

 _“John_ ,” Sherlock said, outraged. “Shut up.”

“What? Seriously, Sherlock, you know that I would never, if you’re not, I mean, how can you _possibly—”_

“John.”

“I mean, _look at me!_ Except, no, don’t look at me, that’s exactly the point, you don’t have to—”

 _“John!_ The shutting up part? _Now,_ if you please.”

John shut up, lowering that one eye-hiding hand and finally looking at him. 

“Thank you,” Sherlock said. 

John’s eyebrows went up in considerable surprise. Perhaps this was a phrase Sherlock might use more often if it routinely produced such emphatic results. 

“It’s all right,” Sherlock said after a moment. 

John rubbed his face and let out a perplexed breath. “ _How_ can it be all right, Sherlock? _I have tentacles.”_

“And _cephalopodic_ tentacles at that,” Sherlock said. “With working chromatophores! Ones that you can _explain_ how you’re working! Which is something of a challenge when one’s studying such bodies in octopi, who despite their many intriguing qualities have a poor reputation as conversationalists and no as-yet confirmed interest in peer-reviewed journals. Do you have _any idea_ how much more fascinating you’ve just become?”

“Oh great,” John murmured. “Yeah, should’ve seen _this_ coming. Could this possibly get any worse? I’m going to be an experiment now.”

“Didn’t think it was possible,” Sherlock was muttering under his breath. “You do something new and interesting every day regardless, never react exactly the way one might expect you to, but this, _this—”_

“Yep, here we go.” John rubbed his face again, but this time the displayed distress was far less extreme and much more familiar. 

“John. You were _already_ brilliant.”

“Oh really. That’s not what you said when—”

“For a _normal_ person—”

“Yes, once again you’ve turned that into an insult. It’s just a gift, I suppose…”

“John,” Sherlock said. “Stop it and just talk sense for a change. _How have you become this way?”_

“Uh,” John said, and let his arms flop down on either side of the bath again. He let out a breath of what sounded like mixed confusion and exasperation, with a touch of John-typical wry humour. “Don’t suppose there’s any point in trying to get you to believe I was bitten by a radioactive cuttlefish?”

Sherlock gazed at him quizzically. “It would rather strain credibility…”

The look John gave him suggested that this was somehow not the desired response. “Forget I mentioned it. It’s, uh… a family thing.”

“Family,” Sherlock said dubiously. 

“Well, genetic. A bit.”

Sherlock frowned, trying to work out how on earth such a trait, at very best wildly chimeric, could be passed on inside a family. “The mechanism would have to be fairly obscure…”

John actually snorted at that. “Yes, it would be. By anybody’s reckoning. Apparently my great-great-grandmother was a cecaelia.”

Sherlock blinked. 

“Yeah,” John said, and sighed. “Somewhere on some moonlit beach in the 1800’s, a Watson got unusually adventurous and had a date with a passing octolady…” His voice went dry. “Normally the trait’s a recessive. Unusual in males. But something in my mother’s genetic makeup, maybe a few generations back for her too, reinforced it and it popped out in me.”

“But not your sister?”

John blanched, and all the tentacles did too. “Thank God, no. Like her drink problem isn’t enough.” He rolled his eyes. “I had to put up with enough jokes from her about ‘Great-Grand-Nan Ursula’ as it was.”

John was looking at Sherlock as if expecting some particular response to this. Then after a moment John laughed down his nose. “For you popular culture’s just something that happens to other people, isn’t it?”

Sherlock waved that away, as he had no interest in being or doing anything that the general populace found attractive. “So you’ve been this way all the time we’ve known each other…”

“I’ve been this way since I was fourteen.”

“Delayed manifestation. Fascinating. Is it hormonal, perhaps something connected to puberty?”

“The enhancement didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual, Sherlock. The family kind of preferred me to keep it to myself. One of the reasons I left for med school and the Army as soon as I could. Nobody likes being reminded all the time that they’re an example of the family’s old bad blood.”

Sherlock waved that away too. “Idiots,” he said. “But John, this explains so much!” He actually started pacing, which was something of an accomplishment in their bathroom, the space being a bit confined. “That time I fell in the Thames last February and all your clothing below the waist somehow mysteriously went missing when you dragged me out—”

“Yes, well, when you got snagged on that sunken wreckage and didn’t come up for more than a minute, I was in kind of a rush since as I recall your lungs were on their way to being half full of _water_ at the time—”

Sherlock rolled his eyes in aggrieved dismissal. What had been most memorable for _him_ at the time (once he'd finished being resuscitated and coughing the water up) was John having to wear a shock blanket home afterwards, wrapped around his waist like some sort of EMT-themed waffle-weave kilt. Now Sherlock was already imagining all kinds of experiments based around measuring the fabric stresses and other physical phenomena associated with a sudden John-to-octoJohn transition. “But I’ve fallen in the Thames lots of times. And so have you, but you haven’t always lost your pants. So this is an _elective_ alteration.”

“Uh, yes. Nothing like that poor lady in ‘Splash’.”

“What?”

“Oh, God, never mind.”

“Yes, thank you, let’s move on. Where exactly _are_ your legs at the moment?”

“Uh, sort of in abeyance.”

Sherlock paused for a moment, wondering how best to phrase the next issue. The circumstances were admittedly delicate. “But other things,” Sherlock said, “are not.” 

“Noooo,” John said, looking thoughtfully at Sherlock. 

Sherlock was instantly torn between the desire to inquire further and a strange reluctance to do so. “The tentacles,” he said, by way of misdirection. “Are they fully manipulative?”

John snickered. “Now there’s an interesting question, coming from you.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Yes, thank you, John, your attempt at dry wit is appreciated. What are they good for? You didn’t seem to be getting particularly effective results out of them earlier.”

“Fine, _you_ try doing better feeling around for things with your eyes closed.” John snorted. “You’d be surprised what I can do with these.” 

There was something wicked lurking about the edges of his tone of voice. It made the hair stand up on the back of Sherlock’s neck, but in a good way. He suddenly felt very much inclined to say or do something that would lure that obscure wickedness into plainer view. 

“Perhaps you’d be so good as to demonstrate,” Sherlock said. 

John looked at Sherlock, one eyebrow up. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Consider yourself tempted, John.” 

The other eyebrow went up. 

“For _science.”_

That was when John burst out laughing: that goofy giggle of his. Sherlock immediately captured the sound and archived it in his mind palace where it would have no chance to go missing, for he’d never heard John giggle in the bathroom before, and the bright acoustics enhanced the sound wonderfully. More to the point, however, the laugh was full of the sound of John realizing that things _were_ indeed all fine. And there was nothing more important than that John should know that. 

John grinned, then, and leaned on the edge of the bath on folded arms. From all around him the tentacles came arching out, and four of them carefully curled their very tips around four anchor points on Sherlock’s tee shirt and pulled it up and over his head. A fifth tentacle reached behind him to the bathroom door, where a coat hanger hung over a hook. It fetched the hanger over; others slipped Sherlock’s tee shirt over it, straightened it, and hung it up behind the door. 

Such was his distraction at this that it took Sherlock a moment to notice that two more of the tentacles had mischievously started making themselves busy undoing the bowknot that held Sherlock’s pyjama bottoms up. But then they stopped. Sherlock found to his shock that he had no eyes for the tentacles at the moment. Indeed, he had no eyes for anything but John’s, and the look in them. 

“Sherlock,” John said as the end of one of the tentacles reached down just enough to gently wave at the front of his pyjama bottoms below the waistband; and once again stopped. John’s voice dropped a bit lower. “You’re… interested.”

Sherlock shivered, just once, all over. 

“John,” he said, and paused: because, truly, the subject was a matter of some delicacy. Yet he needed John to know beyond any possibility that everything was fine, it was all fine: whether or not John wanted, now or ever, to allow… _matters…_ to proceed further. “Available evidence suggests… that so were you.” _Past tense. Past tense is safer. After all, it might not be so now; things change so quickly, so inexplicably, for_ normal _people…_

John’s eyes followed Sherlock’s gaze, which for the moment was resting on the lube bottle. “That, uh, could have been due to a failed date.”

“John,” Sherlock said. _“Seriously.”_

John rolled his eyes, the expression one of mild annoyance and a strange sad sort of resignation. “Um,” John said. “All right, yes.”

“So,” Sherlock said. And wasn’t quite sure where to go after that. 

“So,” John said. 

They looked at each other. 

“Well, don’t just stand there sweating,” John said after a moment, quite gently. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

***

It took a few moments to get things sorted out. The bath was no bigger than usual for a British bathroom, and it meant John and his appendages scooting up to one end of the bath so that Sherlock could insert himself carefully down at the other. But finally they were settled, Sherlock leaning up against the non-tap end, while John settled himself carefully down at the end with the taps, the tentacles wreathing themselves gracefully about in the air or water seemingly as they pleased. Sherlock reached out to the nearest one and spent a while running the end of it through his fingers, testing the strength and flexibility of it. John leaned back and watched him, looking thoughtful. 

“How long?” John said after a little while.

“Hm? What?”

“How long have you been… interested?”

 _Since you killed a man to save my life. A very long time. Forever._ “…Some while,” Sherlock said at last. 

John looked at him with an expression that simply could not be read. “You might have said.” 

Sherlock’s mouth made a moué of attempted scorn. But John just shook his head. _“You,”_ he said, “are not fooling _anybody.”_

At any other time Sherlock might have laughed off such an assertion. Now, however, he was feeling exposed in ways that had nothing to do with mere physical nakedness. “John, I—”

“It’s mutual,” John said quietly, watching him. “That’s all you need to know.” He swallowed. “Very, very mutual.”

Sherlock lay still and let that sink in. After a few breaths, very uncertain of what else to do, he simply sighed and leaned back and closed his eyes. _Reaction,_ he thought. _That’s all this is. Reaction. I’ll be fine in a while…_

Water splashed softly around them, a little of it sloshing onto the floor. “Sherlock,” John said, and began to change position. 

Sherlock held still as John moved to settle against him, chest to chest, the water between them warming perceptibly. Around them both the tentacles too moved, and Sherlock dropped the one he’d been examining to lie back, arms draped loosely on either side of the bath. Under him, strong, smooth, the tentacles moved to embrace him. 

Sherlock knew from casual research that the suckers of cephalopod tentacles could be very damaging to human skin if the octopus in question was frightened or angry. But he’d never thought to follow this data through to another possible set of conclusions: regarding what it might be like, or feel like, if the owner of the tentacles was calm, or friendly, or even affectionate. 

Now he knew. It was rather like being kissed, kissed many times at once, kissed all over; delicate suction, each site smaller in focus than any mouth but as firm as lips, caressing. And the boneless dexterity of the tentacles, strong and sure in some places or soft and supple in others as they made their way through the water and around Sherlock’s body, squeezing firmly here, supporting, cushioning there: in yet other places, tip-tickling or sweetly stroking— 

The breath went out of Sherlock as one of these slipped over his shoulder and curled between his shoulderblades, supporting the back of his neck; and as another, warm and gentle, slid down his front, low, lower still, and then wrapped itself twice softly around his manhood and began to squeeze and stroke. Sherlock’s head fell a bit forward as he gasped, his eyes closed. He felt breath against his lips, a smiling mouth touching his. 

_“Now_ then,” John said. 

_Maybe,_ Sherlock mused, _I should buy a bigger bath._

“Hey,” John said softly. “Genius. Stop thinking.”

 _We._ We _should buy. A bigger bath. Mmmf…_

As the kiss began, as it gained speed and depth, as hands and limbs of various kinds moved over him, touching, caressing, Sherlock stopped thinking. Or more accurately, _John_ stopped him thinking. It was terrifying, and sublime. _Where has this been all my life? Where have_ I _been all my life?_

 _Waiting to be here?_ This _here, this now?_

_Whatever happens next, it’ll have been worth the wait._

The kiss paused. 

“John,” Sherlock said, opening his eyes again. 

John was gazing up at him, looking for something: waiting. “Got your breath back?”

Sherlock nodded. “Ready when you are,” he said, hardly above a whisper, into John’s open lips.

John smiled again, leaned in, wrapped himself fully around Sherlock and began pulling him gently under the surface of something far warmer than the water. And Sherlock, for his part, willingly breathed that _something_ deep, and for the very first time, let himself drown.

***

Even tentacles can’t make a bath comfortable for very long: and anyway, the water was warming up, and apparently not even John’s unusual genetic heritage could keep the human part of him from going all pruney after extended exposure to water. 

So they moved on. In Sherlock’s bed, Egyptian cotton had given way for the season to high-thread-count linen, which felt significantly cooler. Even so it was still so warm that they lay quite happily on top of the sheets and spent some time exploring both options that didn’t require tentacles, and further ones that did. As might have been expected, John was most expert on one side of the divide, and increasingly boldly experimental on the other. It was close to midnight before they were ready to call it quits for the evening, as some of the more interesting techniques would be impossible to pursue with open windows without the neighbours becoming convinced that some unusual sort of murder was being committed inside 221B instead of being solved there. 

Drowsy, now at last having a referent for the phrase “splendidly shagged out” as it applied to John, Sherlock drew him close and murmured over his shoulder, “Will you tell me what went wrong?”

“With the date?” 

“Mmm.”

John produced one of those short sniffs of down-the-nose laughter in which he specialised. “Everything.”

“Inaccurate,” Sherlock said, stretching, lazy, against the surprisingly welcome heat-source presently arching his back cozily against Sherlock's front. “Something acted as an accelerant.”

“Come on, it’s not like she poured petrol on me, Sherlock.”

“Well, _figuratively_ speaking.”

Another sniff/laugh, more amused. “Dinner,” John said.

“Oh? …Oh. I see.”

Very softly, very helplessly, John began to laugh. “Now _how_ did you…?” John said. And then he simply shook his head and hugged Sherlock’s arm to his stomach, shaking his head. “All right, go on.”

“You wore your suit,” Sherlock said. “In London, in _this_ weather? There are only a certain number of places formal enough that in high summer a gentleman really _needs_ to wear a suit to avoid standing out or being mistaken for a tourist. Also, you went out with a pocket square, John. You came back with it shoved in your trouser pocket. She pulled it out of your pocket and used it as a napkin. So déclassé.” He smiled. 

“But something else was in your breast pocket when you came home: a business card. Takes a fairly heavy card stock to show through even your suit’s material. Hundred and twenty pound stock or better. No restaurants in town are using such heavy linen-rag stock in their business cards: not in _this_ economy. Out to dinner, but not at a restaurant? Therefore a hotel. Only two hotels in London print their cards on such card stock. You weren’t in Claridges: you’d have been there well before I texted you, even with the traffic today, not as you were just sitting down. Therefore you were in the Savoy. When you came in I could smell the soy sauce that she spilled on you. That tells me you were in their new grill venue, Kaspar’s. Named after the legendary ceramic cat who becomes the fourteenth guest at any Savoy dinner party that numbers only thirteen. Views over the river from the Embankment side: very choice.” 

“Also the air conditioning,” John said. “Good so far.” He arched against Sherlock once again, for the moment a bit catlike himself. “Tell me more.”

Sherlock smiled again. “From her side of the transaction it's a perfect place for a lady on the make to be seen— very upscale, but tastefully so. And easily escaped from, either through the Strand entrance or the one on the Savoy Place side. That building's absolutely a warren: all it would need would be the decision that her nose needed powdering, and it’d take you GPS and a native guide to find her again if she didn’t care to be found. From your side, of course, it's someplace where via the pre-theatre menu you could look expansive and generous but could also give her dinner without breaking the bank. A clever and economical strategy, though at fifteen quid for a glass of wine you wouldn’t be smart to encourage her to linger. Once you put your nose through the lobby door, though, you were already convinced you’d made a mistake, as her eyes weren’t on you but on the high rollers hanging about waiting to get into the American Bar. She received an ‘emergency’ call between the starter and the mains—generated by one of those Web-based send-a-fake-phone-call-to-your-smartphone services, I’d fancy, or an app on her own phone that she’d activated in case the whole early evening started turning into a loss. Then she made her excuse and dumped you for some more conspicuously flush target swilling one of their overpriced shaken-but-not-stirred martinis with the sozzled olives. But that’s not what changed your mind.”

A bit of a silence. “No,” John said. “During the starters I realized that I’d… chosen badly.”

“Well, yes, you had,” Sherlock said, gently stroking John’s chest. “I could have told you that before you left.”

John nodded. “She’s a consumer,” he said. “And I was just something to be consumed. Or actually, just a meal ticket. A stepping stone to something better.” He sighed. 

“True. And by playing your best card right up front, as it were, you tempted her into laying her own cards on the table at the outset. Very well played.”

“So let me get this straight. You’re saying I was actually _cleverly_ stupid.”

Sherlock exercised the better part of valour and declined to answer the question. “But your issue, actually, was that somehow _she_ chose badly. What did she have for her starter, John?”

John simply laughed and turned in Sherlock’s arms, reaching up to take his flatmate’s face between his hands. “You know what she had. Why do you need me to tell you?”

“I always need you. To tell me,” Sherlock said, very soft. “And I always will.”

John (having heard the telling pause) breathed out, laid his forehead against Sherlock’s, nodded, and (chuckling) said the last word he would ever need to say about Arabella, or indeed any of his other dates: 

“…Calamari.”

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes for "The C Word" are [here](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/57992197185/the-c-word-notes-and-links) at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


End file.
